12 Days on the run up to Christmas

 1.  Decide what to eat. Tick. 

Fairly easy for us.  Favourites abound in our house and we tend not to use holiday for trying out new receipts.

Individual beef welling, fillet steak wrapped in pate and puff pastry, baby potatoes, mixed vegetables.  

2. Decide who to invite. Tick.

Another easy one, no one.  Two reasons for this, one being the virus restrictions. Second being we don’t have close friends that we would choose to spend Christmas lunch with.  We did that one year when we went to a restaurant in Latchi with some new comers to Cyprus. Our daughter was here recovering from a broken heart and their son was visiting.  It was a pretty good day but relationship broke down a little while after so the ‘never again’ came into play!

3. What would we like for presents?

This is usually something for the house, an extravagance we take as a treat for us.

This year was slightly different.  Mr D’s electric wet and dry razor packed up.  It was a long, slow death with the razor hanging on to the last gasp and then after three or four days jumped back into action on its own in the bathroom.  By that time a new replacement had been ordered and a proper barber found in Polis with recommendation from several gentlemen in the area.

The supplier then said they could not dispatch the Cyprus.. God alone knows why.  So to ease the carriage of much needed razor the help of a friend in England was  enlisted and he tried to send it via Royal Mail.  The man at Royal Mail he say non.  Let’s try TNT thought our friend.  Ahh, looking good.  Accepted and on its way.  Not so.  Address not recognised.  I feel like cutting my throat.

Thank god for the barber in Polis.

Eventually it did arrive at the local bakery and all’s well with the clean shave.

4. And for me...

Well, I had recently taken delivery of a mini food processor. Oh, what a delight. The one I had was years old and the blades were not in a good shape. 

So, I decided to go for something a bit girly from  Marks and at the same time get some slippers for us both.

You may think boring, but these tiles are cold, cold, cold and I particularly wanted something to go with my new pink fluffy pjs.  Ok?

By the way our Marks order took a whole six or seven days whereas the new razor took about three weeks!

5. Book call with daughter. Tick.

Sounds a bit weird but she is a support worker so I never know when she will be free.  But hooray, this year she has Christmas dat off! 

6. Make soup. Tick.

Mmmm, celery and tomato.  Last year I got a soup maker. I never knew there was such a thing but heard someone talking about it and as we always make lots of soup in the winter it was a ‘must have’ thing. 

I got a recipe book from the internet aptly called ‘100 soup maker recipes’ by Liana Green. I have the Delia one but this is the business.  

One thing I find really useful are the two indices, one in page order and the other alphabetical by ingredients.  This is where the green marker pen comes in handy.

7. Trifle. Tick.

We have been doing a fair amount of comfort food recently and Mr D said oooohhh trifle (and 100s and 1,000s on top). 

I must admit to getting shop bought Swiss roll and ready made custard but it is the thought that counts, surely.

8. Chicken liver pâté. Tick.

To be used on the beef Wellington.  I made a pate recently but wanted fresh, so all in hand to make tomorrow, with help from the new processor.

9. Get Christmas Day steak from butcher. Tick.

The butcher in Polis has supplied us with fillet steak and we have been very pleased so chose them again.  

10.  Collect gammon joint from local butcher. Tick for tomorrow.

We have decided to have a go at an amazing recipe featured by Jamie’s Oliver on his channel for out post-Christmas meat. Looking forward to getting the juices flowing on that one.

11. Clean the house and sort a few decorations. Tick.

Ever since March we have not had help around the house so things have ticked over between the two of us.  It can be a bit hit and miss but it works.

Decorations put together from a manic box which lives in what is equivalent to a Cyprus loft.

12. Sit back, relax, and be thankful for all the positive things in life. Tick.

We sometimes get bogged down by things going on but we should never loose sight of the important things.

Live, love, laugh, and be happy with your lot.

Happy Christmas to every one and see you next year. xxxxxx

Christmas cabbage and chrysanthemum

 Well, winter has arrived with a Big Bang, flash and wallop of a storm at five am this morning.

I may have mentioned before that our lovely dog was found tied up in a forest, lost, alone, no one knows for how long, and as a result is she is terrified of storms, hunting days with guns going off and any sort of loud noises.

We do get tranquillisers for her from the local vet and she happily takes her medication when a storm starts, but needs lots of hugs and petting.  The light weight duvet comes in handy at the same time.

We had planned to go on an early morning run to the supermarket but obviously had to delay everything because of the storm.

Mr D was hoping to go go to the barber for a wet shave (still waiting for new razor to arrive) and other ‘must do’ things (we only go out once a week now as infection rates are so high) and we had a few other things to do.

Nothing that cannot wait until tomorrow!

So, last night we had a mini roast, lamb, roasties, using up veggies from the fridge, and.... first cabbage from the garden...

Yummie.

We are definitely having fun with cooking and we still stick to our no waste policy.

Chess and knitting are coming on and our log burner is a god send.  We have the cleaning out and re setting down to a fine art of about 9 or 10 minutes.  Not bad. 

Christmas is just around the corner now and plans progress for our foodie day, then I think I will have a bit of a light and dry January.

I was going to maybe bring this plant in but it has now been bashed up by the storm but I do have a Christmas wreath to decorate for the wall so that should be quite festive.

I will try and get another blog on before Christmas, but I wish you all a splendid time whatever you are doing and look forward to a better next year.

The cat, the rat and the snake

 With me feeling unwell for a day or so one of our cats decided to bring me a couple of presents to make me feel better.

The first day I hadn’t felt well I woke up at about quarter to five.  Mr D and I have an agreement that if either of us don’t feel well in the night we will wake the other.

So, with us both awake and the dog grumbling about the disturbance in the night we felt it  was just one of ‘those moments’ and nothing more to worry about.

We drifted through the day but was glad to get back to bed at a fairly early night.

We always have a light on over-night and at about two a.m. I was woken by the cat calling me from the hallway outside the bedroom.

Sitting up and very bleary eyed I could make out Daisy the dog, Honey the cat and something else.  Getting out of bed I realised it was a rat, which I can only assume Honey had brought in as a present.

Well, the next hour or so was like something out of a French farce ... close our bedroom door to stop Roland (the rat) getting in there.  Put Daisy Dog in bedroom.  Open kitchen back door.  Try and chase Roland out into the garden. Try and keep Honey off Roland.

All to no avail.  Roland took cover at the side of the dish washer.

There was absolutely nothing I could do!  I didn’t want to wake Mr D up again at some unearthly hour.

The only thing to do was to leave the back door open with the hope it would get fed up and bugger off on its own and for me to go back to bed.

Daisy the dog was pretty fed up with this game by now so I hoped we could get some sleep.  It all went well for about half an hour then Daisy wanted to check on the situation in the kitchen so proceeded to paw at the door.

Me - get out of bed, let Daisy out, get back into bed.  About half an hour later Daisy decided to give up and come back to bed.  Daisy - paw the bedroom door, me - get out of bed and let her in, Daisy - jumped on the bed and took up most of the space, me - got back into bed and dozed off until about six.

Went into the kitchen and Roland seemed to have moved on just leaving some poo on the sitting room floor for me to clean.

Out with the bleach and mop,then on with the coffee. Ahhh, bliss.

I should mention that throughout the whole of the saga Jaz the Cat sat very comfortably on the sofa watching with great interest.

We are still lucky enough to be getting some warm, sunny days and in the afternoon decided to sit in the garden to get some fresh air.

Honey was in her usual spot on the fence with Daisy pottering around enjoying her toys.

Suddenly Honey jumped down to the other side of the fence and was very interested in something.  Mr D went to investigate and she had got a snake and decided she should share it with Daisy.

Get a dog, they said (they should have said cat as well) it will be fun, they said.

First priority, get Daisy in the house.

Second priority, distract Honey from snake.

Third priority, ‘encourage’ snake to exit the garden and not come back.

I feel that if I had not  been poorly none of this would have happened!

Well, I made up for it today by doing a short supply run and found bean sprouts AND jalapeños, how good is that - 19 days and counting.